Subject: Re: [Cbe-oss-dev] [PATCH] Cell SPU task notification

From: Christoph Hellwig <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:19:02 +0100

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 09:56:12AM -0600, Maynard Johnson wrote:
> I haven't seen that the scheduler patch series got applied yet.  This 
> Cell spu task notification patch is a pre-req for OProfile development 
> to support profiling SPUs.   When the scheduler patch gets applied to a 
> kernel version that fits our needs for our OProfile development, I don't 
> see any problem in using the sched_flags field instead of notify_active.

I'll hopefull commit these patches this weekend, I'm at a conference
currently so not really able to do a lot of work.  If you need to make
more progress until than just apply the hunk that introduces sched_flags
before doing your patch.

> Yes, the yield() and the memory barriers were leftovers from an earlier 
> ill-conceived attempt at solving this problem.  They should have been 
> removed.  They're gone now.

Ok.

> I hesitated doing this since it would entail changing spu_switch_notify 
> from being static to non-static.  I'd like to get Arnd's opinion on this 
> question before going ahead and making such a change.

There is no difference in impact between marking a function non-static
and adding a trivial wrapper around it, only that the latter creates
more bloat.  So I don't think there's a good argument against this.